Designing a time-to-event study

Readings

• Hernán MA, Sauer BC, Hernández-Díaz S, Platt R, Shrier I. Specifying a target trial prevents immortal time bias and other self-inflicted injuries in observational analyses. Journal of clinical epidemiology. 2016 Nov 1;79:70-5.

Notes and slides

So far, we have discussed the nuts and bolts of analysis of time-to-event data. But in practice, using these tools effectively requires knowledge of study design. This week, we cover some highlights of study design, including overviews of the “target trial” framework and what to do about late entries.

Videos

Recordings of lectures are available on the EPID 722 Sakai site.

Exercise

This week’s exercise is available on the EPID 722 Teams site. Please note that you will need to download the dataset from the data folder. The exercise questions can be found under /Class Materials/Exercises/Exercise 7/Exercise 7.docx. Sample SAS and R code can be found in the same folder.

Optional Reading

This reading presents a nice example of a target trial.

García-Albéniz X, Hsu J, Hernán MA. The value of explicitly emulating a target trial when using real world evidence: an application to colorectal cancer screening. European journal of epidemiology. 2017 Jun;32(6):495-500.

Questions

Please use the form below to submit your questions about this week’s reading.